Artificial intelligence is reshaping expectations for the pace of professional services firms, leaving consulting clients increasingly impatient.
“I am seeing clients ask for our help in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace” compared to this time last year, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC’s managing partner for the Washington DC area, told Themoneytimes.
“Something that we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that. The shelf life is half,” Johnson said.
Clients aren’t necessarily demanding full transformations in a fraction of the time; rather, the expectation centers on pilots and proofs of concept, she noted.
“There’s an expectation now that tools should accelerate the work,” she added.
Johnson oversees more than 2,200 consulting and accounting staff as PwC’s DC managing partner. When asked if those compressed timelines were pressuring her consulting teams, she replied: “We’re working on it.”
The Big Four professional services firms — PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY — along with firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, sit at the heart of the AI transformation sweeping workplaces. They’ve rushed to develop internal chatbots, train personnel, and pilot AI in client engagements.
The technology now assists with, and increasingly executes, early-stage consulting tasks like market research, due diligence, and brainstorming.
At McKinsey, AI has sped up the early problem-solving cycle, converting what was once a team’s “week one answer” — the initial hypothesis following a week of research and analysis — into an “hour one answer,” Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s Global Leader for technology and AI, told Themoneytimes in June.
That allows consultants to dedicate more time to probing deeper aspects of the issue tree instead of waiting days to get up to speed, Smaje said.
Among rank-and-file staff, employees at leading firms have told Themoneytimes they’re noticing a difference in delivery times thanks to AI.
A software engineer at Deloitte US told Themoneytimes that certain coding tasks had dropped from a multi-day process to roughly five minutes with AI, while an EY-Parthenon consultant in the UK reported that due diligence previously requiring two weeks of manual effort and spreadsheet management can now be finished in a day using AI.
Beyond pressure to deliver faster results, the shift is also prompting questions about how the pricing model built on human labor will evolve as AI handles more work.
The Work Is Growing More Complex
For Johnson, quicker delivery shouldn’t be mistaken for reduced workload.
AI will alter how consultants allocate their time, freeing up capacity for more meaningful or higher-value tasks rather than merely cutting the hours required on a project, she told Themoneytimes.
The work itself is also growing more complex, she added. Clients are contending with geopolitical tensions, conflicts, tariffs, and macroeconomic uncertainty all at once — a wider array of pressures than consultants typically helped them address in the past.
“The confluence of all those things at the same time is something that we used to deal with one or two things at a time,” Johnson said.
“Now we’re in a world order where we have to deal with 10 plus, plus, plus at a time.”